The latest relase of the WIndows Azure platform, portal and tools (check here) includes support for one of the features announced at PDC last month: remote desktop access to your role instances. This feature is pretty easy to use and currently allows you to deploy a preconfigured VM with IIS where you can play with the OS. No real application needed!

Here’s how:

Create a new Cloud Service and add one Web Role. This should be the result:

Once that is done, right click the Cloud Service and select “Publish…”

In the publish dialog, click “Confiure Remote Desktop connections…”

Create (or select) a certificate, make sure you also export the private key for it.

Enter some credentials and set te expiration date for the account to some far future.

Here’s an example of how that can look like:

Don’t publish yet!

Navigate to http://windows.azure.com and create a new Hosted Service. In this hosted service, upload the certificate you just created:

Once that is done, switch back to Visual Studio, hit the Publish button and sit back while your deployment is being executed.

At a given moment, you will see that deployment is ready.

Switch back to your browser, click your instance and select “Connect” in the toolbar:

Enter your credentials, prefixed with \. E.g. “\maarten”. This is done to strip off the Windows domain from the credentials entered.

Maarten Balliauw works at Microsoft. His interests are mainly web applications developed in ASP.NET (C#) or PHP and the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Maarten also co-founded MyGet, hosting private NuGet, npm and Bower feeds for teams.